


Hit the Ground

by celeste9



Category: Primeval
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Comfort Sex, Decisions, F/M, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 21:38:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1564961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night Becker came back from his rescue mission without Sarah, Lorraine stayed late at her desk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hit the Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Happy late birthday to rain_sleet_snow! I'm afraid in the end I couldn't quite manage Blade, so I've gone for your second choice, hope you will like it! For 'fork in the road' on my trope_bingo card. Thank you to fredbassett for the beta.

The night Becker came back from his rescue mission without Sarah, Lorraine stayed late at her desk. She was filing reports for Lester, reports that would have been left for him to do. He had gone home to his wife, however, and Lorraine hoped that he was finding a measure of comfort. She suspected that whatever comfort he found would be more than she herself would get.

Lorraine didn’t even realise Becker was still in the ARC until she went to the locker room to retrieve her coat. He was just sitting there on one of the benches, his shoulders slumped, a faint waviness to his hair that suggested he’d showered and let it air-dry, untouched.

“Becker?” Lorraine said.

He looked startled, which was unusual. It was hard to sneak up on Becker without him realising. “Sorry, am I bothering you?”

She shook her head, taking a few steps closer. “Oh, no. Actually, it’s probably me who’s bothering you.”

“No, I...” Becker waved his hand vaguely. “I didn’t want to go home, that’s all. I...”

Lorraine thought she understood. The thought of her own flat, empty and cold, wasn’t terribly appealing either. She had stayed so late only partly to be a help to Lester. Mostly it had been because she needed to be doing something, something to make her stop imagining Sarah. It must have been worse for Becker - he didn’t need to imagine anything. “I don’t want to be alone,” she confessed.

Becker focused on her, his hazel eyes looking hollow. “Me, neither.”

-

Lorraine took Becker home with her and it wasn’t about love, or even affection, though she did care about him and she hoped that he felt the same for her. But it wasn’t about that.

It was about grief, and loss, and solace. It was about feeling something, something that wasn’t sadness and pain. Taking comfort in each other when Lorraine had thought there was none to be had.

There was only Becker in her bed, his hands upon her skin, the press of their bodies. If Becker’s touch was a bit desperate and his pace a bit frantic, well, Lorraine didn’t mind.

When it was over, Becker laid his head on Lorraine’s breast and nothing had changed, but Lorraine felt a little better all the same.

-

When the ARC got shut down, Lorraine felt like she was standing on the edge of a precipice, having to take a leap but not knowing where it would take her. More than anything, she was angry. She was angry that no one was taking them seriously, what they’d done, the good they’d done. She was angry because she knew that with the anomalies running unchecked people would die, innocent people, and there would be nothing she could do to stop it. She was angry because it felt like her friends had struggled and sacrificed and died for nothing.

“I was going to resign,” Becker told her, after, as they stood in the empty building, preparing to leave for good. He looked strange in civilian clothes, smaller, somehow. “I suppose now I don’t have to bother.”

“What?”

Becker looked away from her. “It seems to me that all I did was get people killed. Maybe this is for the best.”

Lorraine dug her fingernails into the skin of her palm so she wouldn’t hit him in the face. “No, that’s a load of bollocks. After everything, after all the people we’ve lost, after _Sarah,_ that’s the choice you would make? I guess you’re the biggest coward of all of us.”

She left him standing there, alone in the ARC, and wondered whether she was angrier at him for planning to leave or at herself for thinking she could have made a difference.

She pounded her punch bag for hard enough and long enough that her knuckles cracked even beneath the tape, but she still didn’t have an answer.

-

When Lester got sent back to the Home Office, he took Lorraine with him.

“Worried I wouldn’t have got a job on my own?” she asked him, their first morning.

Lester’s smile was as weak as Lorraine’s joke. “More that I didn’t wish to lose your formidable skill set just yet.”

That was high praise coming from Lester but it served only to make Lorraine feel uncomfortable. He was trying too hard. He had already lost so much and she thought he couldn’t cope with any more change, even if was only adjusting to a new PA.

Lorraine settled in at her new desk, feeling more out of place than she had a right to. It had only been a few years since she’d left the Home Office for the ARC, but it may as well have been a lifetime.

-

When Lester called Lorraine into his office, months later, his words were anything but what she had expected.

“I’ve been asked to take charge of the ARC again.”

“Sir?”

“Apparently the small incident with the Stegosaurus was enough to make them admit I may have had a point when I insisted shutting down the ARC would be a mistake.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” Lorraine said, and she meant it. The ARC was filled with painful memories but she still believed in the work they had done. She still believed that that work was necessary.

“Unfortunately, there are to be a few... changes,” Lester said with a sigh.

And then he told her about Philip Burton.

-

When Becker opened the door of his flat for Lorraine, it was the first time she had seen him in months. The dark stubble over his cheeks and jaw was an indication that he hadn’t shaved that morning and his hair was cut shorter than she’d ever seen it, probably due to the fact he had spent the duration of the ARC’s disbandment trying to get himself killed in Afghanistan. 

She was glad he hadn’t succeeded. She wondered if he was.

“I thought I might be seeing you soon,” he said, and let her in.

“Did you?” Lorraine said. 

Becker’s dark shirt was open at the top, revealing a hint of the chest hair beneath. Lorraine was trying to forget the memory of how that had felt beneath her hands, beneath her cheek when she’d woken up with him still in her bed.

“Figured Lester wouldn’t come himself, that he’d send you instead.”

Lorraine seated herself on Becker’s sofa without invitation, crossing her legs and clasping her hands upon her knee. “I came of my own accord.”

Becker seemed surprised by that, though he didn’t say anything. Lorraine failed to mention that she had made herself indispensible to Lester by knowing what he wanted before he had to ask. She would have come anyway.

“Going to beg me to come back?”

“I’m not going to beg you to do anything. I hope that you will choose to come back, because you’re needed.”

“Needed,” Becker muttered.

Lorraine saw herself standing again on the edge of that precipice, with Becker by her side, but she didn’t know if he would take the leap with her. “Yes, needed. Our friends are out there, Becker, and the anomalies aren’t stopping. I know that you’re a good person. I know that you couldn’t live with yourself if you did nothing, if you let people be hurt because you didn’t try.”

“People were hurt _because_ of me. People _died,_ Lorraine.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Lorraine had been at the ARC from the start, from when they weren’t anything but a handful of people operating out of the Home Office. She had been there for every loss. “I knew Professor Cutter better than you ever did, and Sarah was my friend. But their deaths weren’t your fault. None of it was your fault.”

“You weren’t there. You don’t know-- Sarah died screaming, and I couldn’t help her. I have to live with that; I can’t ever take it back.” Becker’s voice sounded choked, like he was forcing the words out.

“No,” Lorraine said. “No, you can’t. But you can stop things like that from happening again, you can help save lives. No one has the experience that you do. No one can make the difference that you can.” 

She rose to her feet, unable to keep still any longer. 

“I thought, out of everyone, that you would be the one who never gave up on Abby, Connor, and Danny,” she said. “But you have. Even Lester hasn’t given up on them; he still believes that they’re out there and that they will come back to us. But not you. You’ve given up on our friends and you’ve given up on yourself.”

“I’m not a coward,” Becker said, a sudden fierceness to his tone and to his gaze, and Lorraine remembered their last day in the ARC, so many months ago, when she had called him just that. “I’m not a coward, but sometimes there isn’t anything to be done.”

“And sometimes there is. Come back to the ARC,” Lorraine said, and held out her hand.

All that was left was for him to take it.

**_ End _ **


End file.
